Page 3304 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 August 2008
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“They are too far away and they will not bulk-bill.” Sometimes there is just no choice but to go to Calvary and wait for hours in the queue. This is a common story. Would-be patients across Canberra are ringing GP practices only to be told, “We are not taking new patients.” That is not something the government likes to advertise in their Live in Canberra campaign.
Canberra also has the unfortunate situation that it is the most difficult capital city in Australia in which to find a bulk-billing doctor. In 2006 only 48 per cent of non-referred GP visits were bulk-billed in the ACT, which is 14.2 per cent below the next lowest state or territory result and nearly 30 per cent—actually, 28.6 per cent—below the national average.
Mr Speaker, this is a real indictment of the delivery of primary care in this territory. What has the Stanhope Labor government done to address the very serious problem of accessing bulk-billing GPs in the suburbs? It has done very little or nothing. This is a government that likes to boast about how much money they spend, courtesy of our taxes and the rivers of gold from property booms and GST. But they simply do not target that funding to where it is most needed.
The ACT Division of Medical Practice representatives told us at the recent committee inquiry into the closure of Wanniassa medical centre about being bedevilled by bureaucratic red tape, at both the commonwealth and territory levels. They said that this was causing them to be able to see fewer patients as they had to grapple with administration.
We learned too that despite all its proclaimed benefits, there is a real problem with the corporatised medicine model and that government needs to be taking proactive action to deal with the restrictive practices that go with this. For example, in the case of the Wanniassa medical centre, Primary Health Care have simply removed the GPs from one area and taken them to another. Yet they are refusing to relinquish the lease on that building in Wanniassa, which is apparently to remain empty. That is the situation to date. There will be no hope of new doctors being able to move into the premises where there is a ready-made patient population and it would be easy for any GPs relocating from outside the ACT to start up.
There is evidence that the impact of the corporates has been to increase inequities across the ACT, as shown by the closure of the Wanniassa general practice. This is where government has to be actively looking at alternative models of delivery. This is what the Liberal opposition have done. We have been thinking outside the square; we have been talking to, listening to and caring about the community. This government, on the other hand, sits on its hands and cries that it is nothing to do with it, that it cannot do anything. It is not true and it is not good enough. This is the difference between the Canberra Liberals and the ACT Stanhope government. We listen, we care and we act.
The same attitude was in evidence a couple of weeks back when we learned that the government had not done anything to fix the situation which arose last year—last year as well as this year—when medical graduates from the ANU medical school found that they were competing with graduates from New South Wales for an internship at the Canberra Hospital. The Stanhope government could not even get this right.
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